Philippe Van Parijs (French: [filip vɑ̃ paʁɛjs]; born 23 May 1951) is a left-libertarian Belgian philosopher and political economist, mainly known as a proponent and main defender of the basic income concept[1] and for the first systematic treatment of linguistic justice.[2]

He is professor at the Faculty of economic, social and political sciences of the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), where he directs the Hoover Chair of economic and social ethics since its creation in 1991. He was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University's Department of Philosophy from 2004 to 2011, and has been a Visiting Professor at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven since 2006, and a Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, since 2011.

In Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) can justify capitalism?[5] (1995) he argues for both the justice and feasibility of a basic income for every citizen. Van Parijs asserts that it promotes the achievement of a real freedom to make choices. For example, he purports that one cannot really choose to stay at home to raise children or start a business if one cannot afford to. As proposed by Van Parijs, such freedom should be feasible through taxing the scarce, valued social good of jobs, as a form of income redistribution.

Another part of Van Parijs' work is about linguistic justice. In order to address the injustice arising from the privilege enjoyed by English as a global lingua franca, he discusses a wide range of measures such as a language tax[6] which would be paid by English-speaking countries, a ban on the dubbing of films, and the enforcement of a linguistic territoriality principle that would protect weaker languages.[7]